Blog: Tasca in Space

Hello Race Fans! We had an exciting week in Houston. For the second year in a row, I was invited to tour the NASA Johnson Space Center. Last year I had a terrific time and made some good friends with astronauts Mark Kelly and his twin brother Scott. The father and son duo of Mike and Jeff Fox are engineers at NASA and they were instrumental in this year’s tour. I would say the coolest part of my job is meeting people in other industries and developing new relationships.

The NASA folks were kind enough to invite me back and this time it was action packed, to say the least. I had a chance to fly the shuttle simulator, taking the space shuttle out of orbit and landing it at Cape Canaveral. It wasn’t a clean landing, but it was survivable. It always helps to know that you have a master commander in Scott Kelly next to you to give you some coaching instructions. It was a lot of fun.

We also went to see the Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory, or the NBL. The NBL has the world’s largest pool with 6.2 million gallons of water. In the pool is about two-thirds of the International Space Station. Mike Fox gave us a tour of the NBL and showed us how the astronauts train in the pool. We learned that for every hour the astronauts are scheduled to be on a space walk, they spent 10 hours in the pool. Amazing.

I found that really interesting how buttoned down and organized they are and that their working procedures are not that different than what we do on our Motorcraft/Quick Lane Shelby Mustang. They have various double-check procedures and ‘Plan B’ scenarios that we don’t necessarily have. At the end of the day, they’re dealing with life or death situations, no different than what we deal with. There were a lot of things that I could compare to our race team – especially from the safety aspect where you need to be extra organized and double-check every task.

The check and balance that they have at NASA, we have on our race car as well. For example, when we torque the wheels, we have two different people at two different times torque the rear tires. Often we get asked why we have the double-check – that’s because of the speeds and the risks that we have, no different than they have with the space program. It’s always nice to see the same safety precautions in other fields.

What I really liked about my experience at NASA was to drive the Lunar Electric Rover. Antron Brown and I got a shot at taking it up some mountains and craters. We went out to a special field at NASA where they had two areas – one area simulated the ground on Mars while the other was the Moon. A lot of people find the engineering on our race car fascinating, but I found the engineering that they do fascinating. It was just incredible the capabilities of the Lunar Electric Rover. It was the anti-Funny Car. Whatever they could do, we couldn’t do and vice versa. From climbing up hills, and into craters and going up boulders, you can really see the challenges they have to overcome. They really have to get it right because where they’re going, there’s no pit crew to fix the problem. From all the training and testing on the ground, they hopefully will be prepared for what they see when they get back to the Moon or to Mars.

After NASA tour on Thursday, we were back to business on Friday at the race track. Houston was a transitional race for us. My grandfather must have been looking down from above because he had a motto that you never test on race day, and you never want to test on race day. But we have committed to make this change to put in the BOSS 500 platform into our Shelby Mustang. It’s absolutely imperative for us to make this change in order to compete for a championship.

I look at last year and for me, evaluating the season, we did exceptional going into the Countdown - we were fourth in the points. Then we fell off when the conditions came back to what they were like earlier in the season and we didn’t have a tune-up that could compete with the 4.04, 4.05 category. We believe this BOSS 500 platform has that.

Unfortunately, we have to make this change during the season, but I’m very confident in our team and very confident about the progress we made in Houston. In Las Vegas, we won’t be in test mode. We’ll still be working, but we have some great data to look at from our Houston runs and unfortunately we raced Del Worsham and he ran low ET of the round, and I think we would have beat twelve other drivers in the first round.

We have all of the key elements of the BOSS 500 platform in our Shelby Mustang and I think we’re poised to really break out with some really big numbers. There’s a lot of racing ahead. Five races have only gone by. I don’t even look at where we are in the points at this point. It’s such a small spread between where we are and the top five in the points. I’m excited about the BOSS engine. I’m excited about Las Vegas. I love the track in Vegas. It’s a track I’ve been at many times, it’s a great city to race in and I think we have as good a chance as anybody out there to qualify top one through four and compete for the trophy on Sunday.

We’re going to take advantage of one of our test sessions in Vegas where we’ll be able to refine this BOSS 500 platform even more. We’re in full tilt here. This is a team that’s not happy with how we did in Charlotte and Houston. We expect more at every race. Whether you win or not, sometimes you need a little luck to win some of these races, but competing for that trophy is what we want to do. There were some lessons learned in Charlotte and Houston, and we’ll apply those in Vegas. Learn on Monday in Vegas with our test session and start to turn the heat up as this season unfolds.